According to a letter from Cary-Grove High School principal Jay Sargeant, there will be a code red drill at the school on Wednesday.

It will include somebody shooting blanks from a gun in the hallway “in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire.”

Parent Kassy Pinter says: “It’s probably necessary to have the ‘code red’ drill but not really necessary to shoot the blanks in the hallway.”

Seems reasonable. Better yet, just send them to Harper High School in the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago. People get shot there all the time, apparently. If you’re going to traumatize a bunch of high schoolers, might as well do it right.

Setting off a fake nuke to give them an idea of what that might be like? Exploding bombs underground so they know how to handle an earthquake?

As fucked up as it sounds, it is always better to maximize realism in a training event that you are pinning your (or somebody else’s) life on. Gun fire is loud, distracting and can be disorienting. If people train to react correctly while hearing it, that is actually a good thing.

It just screws me up that we are now simulating moving under fire in a school instead of AIT in the Army.

I have been given to understand that while “blanks” may not be deadly they are far from harmless. Beyond that, there is the emotional effect on the kids. I cannot think of any way in which this is a good plan. And beyond all that it strikes me as a law suit waiting to happen.

In a sochalist medical/school system, you could shoot guns off in the school hallways, and then when the kids were traumatized, the gov’t would hire sochalist therapists to help the kids with their post-spontaneous-bullet traumas. But we just send the kids home, and hope their parents don’t have guns in the house – ’cause if they do,traumatized kids might decide to take matters into their own hands.

Despite the trends in our country, the odds of a child being in this situation and developing the corresponding PTSD are still very slim. That’s just plain inefficient. There are better ways to give our children PTSD.

How far gone is this country that I can’t even say that this is a bad thing to do? We could be doing something about getting some of the guns off the street. But, nooooooo, we can’t do that. So schools are trying to come up with ways to teach students not to panic when some nut comes to shoot up the school. I’m so proud.

I dunno, I’m torn. I recently had an ICD installed in my chest, and they knocked me out for the part where they test it, and have it jolt me. They said it just made people fearful and paranoid to feel it, I guess they had trouble with people that just obsessed about it and they had bad outcomes. The part where they dig a hole and cauterize forever was not in that category I guess, I was awake for that, and it was pretty awful. Cauterizing does not smell like a pork chop, which I had assumed, it smells like burning hair and nails. Disgusting.

But I wanted to be prepared for how it would really be if/when it kicks me like a mule. But I’m one of these that prefers bad news to no news. I just want to know.

If they do use blanks, I just hope that whoever does it is aware that they could actually hurt themselves if they fuck around with it.

@celticdragonchick: Brandon Lee was killed by an actual bullet – it had lodged in the gun’s barrel, gone undetected by the weapons master, then was propelled by a blank round just as if it had been fired. Wasn’t his fault.

So schools are trying to come up with ways to teach students not to panic when some nut comes to shoot up the school.

You’re right, it’s clearly better that they panic.

Look, either school shootings are such a remote possibility that they don’t merit a policy response, or they’re something we expect to happen and should prepare for. But if your proposal is that we don’t train kids in any reasonable way to respond to active shooter events, but do take the opportunity to start rounding up guns, then you’ve revealed that you actually don’t give a shit about any children, unless they can be used as a prop to achieve your policy aims vis a vis guns.

Failure to prepare is to prepare to fail. Learning to recognize the sound of gunfire – which isn’t at all like the movies, most people are surprised to learn – isn’t an inherently bad idea under any circumstances. Unless you think we need massacres of children in order to get to where you want us to be on guns. Disgusting.

Locally, some youth leaders are facing jail for kidnapping a church youth group, tying them up, tossing them in the back of a van, and driving off with them. The kids were supposedly experiencing what it’s like living in a country where Christians are persecuted minorities and were not warned beforehand. Some of the parents are suing.

This sounds like another bad idea springing from the same half-baked thought process.

I’m sure this is a government plot to desensitize kids so they’ll be better soldiers when we draft them to invade Iran or North Korea. Or both. At the same time. Because we’ve never done that before. Oh wait…

Oh, it’s good training for them. They’ll need quick reflexes to survive when their GPS lands them in the wrong driveway.
They’ll be battle- hardened veterans in no time, given enough mandatory gun nut defense training.
Ask them if they feel free enough yet whike they’re on lockdown. They love that!

@Chet: You know, 30 years ago, I never had to worry about someone coming into my school and shooting it up, even though crime was higher. Know what the difference is: There were few mass killing guns on the market and in people’s hands.

HOLY FUCKING CRAP, THIS IS MY HOMETOWN. Having said that, YES, this is a GOOD idea, because this Is a very quiet suburban village, and I can guarantee that the vast majority of students there do not know what real live gunfire sounds like. And no, the movies don’t count.

Well, Chet. I think the issue here is that the responsibility for preventing firearms from being used to mow down children lies with adults not children. But yeah, you’re right. It’s far better to have our nation’s children grow up with a siege mentality than to limit magazine capacity, maintain an effective database or limit the type of firearms available. I mean, heaven forbid we at some future point deprive some gun fetishist of his ability to engage in Rambo fantasies and rub one out just because we lack the seriousness to engage in live fire training exercises at our local elementary schools.

Maya and her friend are playing Summer Camp. They are camp counselors for their dolls, who are the campers. The camp is currently having a “Code Red Lockdown.” I’m pretty sure I never played “Code Red Lockdown.”

@Erik Vanderhoff: What they’re doing in Chicago could be derived from something that has been fairly standard for staff at the postsecondary level for a few years called ‘Active Shooter Training’. Part of the training does involve the firing of blanks in the training room by the instructor for the simple reason that a not-insignificant number of people have never heard the sound of a gun at (pardon the pun [if it is one]) close range. Most people expected it to be louder. It was a good part of an excellent and sobering training session, where the instructor went through a lot of the possible responses, along with the rough survival statistics of the various options. Could something like this be successfully geared to the high school level? I have my doubts.

@gex: I shudder. Is it anything like Romans and Christians? I had my faith tested at a Christian camp at nine in a show trial after I was caught by the communists. But we didn’t have a mass shooter drill.

If they do use blanks, I just hope that whoever does it is aware that they could actually hurt themselves if they fuck around with it.

Um, yeah. And, having dealt with lots of teenagers through my years, I can guarantee that some/many of them will have missed the “memo” about WTF is going on. Panicked kids-running-trampling each other maybe? What could go wrong?

Or maybe one of them has listed to the NRA and is taking matters into his own hands & has his own weapon. The possibilities for fuckups are endless.

@Jewish Steel: Oak Knoll was the one school I didn’t go to in Cary – don’t ask me why my parents moved me around so much – but I did go there once with my Ss. Peter & Paul choir to sing Christmas carols. Good times.

Gun nuts like slippery slope arguments unless they involve other people’s kids, but we can play too.
What do you think they’ll demand next? We meekly accepted lockdowns, armed guards and now shock n awe training in our schools.
I’m thinking body armor, but that’s expensive and might require taxes, ie, a sacrifice, so that’s out.

But if your proposal is that we don’t train kids in any reasonable way to respond to active shooter events, but do take the opportunity to start rounding up guns, then you’ve revealed that you actually don’t give a shit about any children, unless they can be used as a prop to achieve your policy aims vis a vis guns.

Just out of curiosity, how do you picture mass shooting events continuing as usual if guns are rounded up?

You know, 30 years ago, I never had to worry about someone coming into my school and shooting it up, even though crime was higher.

Yet 30 years ago school shootings were as common as they are now. You’re right – you didn’t have to worry about it back then.

What makes you think you have to worry about it today, though? School shootings continue to be vanishingly rare. One-off murders with handguns, though? Sickeningly common.

Yet there’s Mnemosyne up there, gung-ho about banning the guns almost nobody uses to kill and completely ignoring the guns almost everybody uses to kill. Why, almost makes you think there’s something going on here that isn’t about a reasonable policy response to empirical reality. Oh, but I forget – that’s not how it works on our side.

I love how wingnuts freak out about teens being taught about birth control or condoms, even in the face of the fact that close to 100% of them will be having sex at some time in their future (or past), but they want to run these crazy drills, to “prepare” for some event (a mass shooting) that has a miniscule chance of happening at their school.

Its like prepping for the asteroid attack but never wearing your seat belt. Wingnut logic is fail.

@Punchy: When my son came home from school one day shortly after Newtown and described to me the safety drill they’d had at school that day, I told him that it was like a tornado drill – our chances of getting hit by a tornado here in Chicago are extremely small, but tornadoes are so dangerous that, in the unlikely event one hits, we really, really need to know what to do. Same thing if, in his words, “someone dangerous” enters the school. And let’s face it, everyone — unless and until mass-murder weaponry is banned AND we figure out an effective way to keep guns away from the mentally ill, this is the reality in America.

So I ask you again, if the guns are rounded up, where is the next set of shooters going to get their guns from?

So I tell you again – they’re going to get them from the millions of guns you won’t be able to round up. For instance, the guns in Canada. The guns in Mexico – millions of guns, in fact, that will be sent over the border once they catch wind of your guns round-up.

I’m not sure what part of that you’re having trouble understanding. Even if you could violate the Constitution and go house to house confiscating all the guns – forget the Second Amendment, you’re talking about violating the Fourth now – there are 300 million firearms in the United States that we know of. The War on Drugs couldn’t round up all the drugs. Why do you think the War on Guns would round up all the guns?

Yet there’s Mnemosyne up there, gung-ho about banning the guns almost nobody uses to kill and completely ignoring the guns almost everybody uses to kill. Why, almost makes you think there’s something going on here that isn’t about a reasonable policy response to empirical reality.

All right, you’ve convinced me — we need to ban all guns. Period.

I was just going for the ones that were most likely to cause the next mass casualty event, but you’ve convinced me that even “responsible” gun owners like yourself are just one lost driver away from killing anyone in their path, so obviously the only solution is to ban all guns since any interim steps would be useless.

@muddy: Why isn’t the obvious first step the step that would do the most good?

Because you think an assault weapons ban is achievable? Don’t you think your basis of popular support for such a ban is going to evaporate once people learn that, statistically, an assault rifle is the safest gun you can own?

So I tell you again – they’re going to get them from the millions of guns you won’t be able to round up. For instance, the guns in Canada. The guns in Mexico – millions of guns, in fact, that will be sent over the border once they catch wind of your guns round-up.

Yes, an active schizophrenic is going to be able to figure out how to negotiate the underground black market of guns rather than pointing and clicking a website or just shooting his mom and taking her guns.

@celticdragonchick: Actually Lee was killed by a cast mate because the prop man fucked up and didn’t ensure the barrel was cleared before loading the blank. There was a bullet lodged in the barrel, and the blank charge expelled it with enough force to kill him.

Yes, an active schizophrenic is going to be able to figure out how to negotiate the underground black market of guns rather than pointing and clicking a website or just shooting his mom and taking her guns.

The “underground black market of guns” is a point and click website, stupid.

Obviously, the problem is legal guns, because all of these mass shooters obtained their guns legally. So let’s ban and confiscate them all. Chet has convinced me that there’s no possible middle ground between putting body armor on schoolkids as they enter the classroom each morning and banning all guns, so I choose the path of banning all guns.

The “underground black market of guns” is a point and click website, stupid.

Uh, no, those website sales are perfectly legal right now. That’s why I said all of those shooters obtained their guns legally.

Show me the news story that says that any of the above shooters did not use legal means to obtain the guns they then used to kill large numbers of people with. The only borderline case is the Newtown killer, who murdered his mother and took her legally obtained guns.

You have a funny definition of “legally” if it includes murdering your mother in order to steal her guns. Oh, excuse me – apparently murder is “borderline legal” to you.

Uh, no, those website sales are perfectly legal right now.

You seem to be confused. Yes, guns can be legally ordered from various websites – in order to do so, one must pass the same background and eligibility checks as one would buying guns from any other place.

The “underground black market of guns”, where gun sales are not legal? That’s also a website, stupid.

Maya and her friend are playing Summer Camp. They are camp counselors for their dolls, who are the campers. The camp is currently having a “Code Red Lockdown.” I’m pretty sure I never played “Code Red Lockdown.”

I felt sick when I read that.

Maybe it’s just me, but I missed the episodes of Leave It To Beaver where Eddie Haskill has his locker searched for firearms, and the Beav was sent home from school for talking back to the volunteer school guard.

You have a funny definition of “legally” if it includes murdering your mother in order to steal her guns. Oh, excuse me – apparently murder is “borderline legal” to you.

Were her guns obtained illegally? If they were, then he used legally obtained guns.

The “underground black market of guns”, where gun sales are not legal? That’s also a website, stupid.

How many of the mass shooting attacks that I named above used illegal means to get their guns? We’ll take out Newtown, since he used his mother’s legal guns but killed her to get them, so let’s put the Beltway snipers in instead.

So, out of Washington DC, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Tucson, or Aurora, which of them used illegally obtained guns for their murders?

And, not to be lame, but I do have to wander away for a couple of hours, but I’ll check back when you can let me know which of the above used illegal guns.

They misunderstand me when they think I care what goes on in their homes. They can live in a fortified bunker for all I care. Arm the whole family. The problem is their guns encountering my kid. I have just as much right as any gun nut to defend my family. If their gun ends up next to my kid, I have a problem. I can’t control their weapons, and they won’t. That leaves the state.

@Chet: Actually, yes, Mnemosyne is right. What’s more, you PERSONIFY the gun problem in America, with your pious pronouncements about how we really should have the ideal in this nation, but never will, so why should we try doing anything? Yes, YOU are the reason my son has to go through gunman drills at school. You and everyone else who says “never mind what just happened; the real problem is the weapons that fire just a few bullets at a time.”

No, in all seriousness, I wasn’t saying that we shouldn’t try to help schoolchildren not freak out and lose it if some nut comes and shoots up the school. No, I was more bemoaning our lot that we’ve let our country devolve into some kind of hellscape where we have to teach our children not to panic if some nut shoot up their school because we aren’t willing to get some of these guns off the street.

I myself would lobby for a few things that I, at least, think would help. The first, and easiest, would be a big-time buyback. Have everybody buy guns back: the federal government, state governments, county, township, town, borough governements, churches, non-profits, anti-gun philanthropists, anybody willing. Bring in your gun, any kind, and we’ll give you some money for it, and not ask you anything about where you got it.

I’d go so far as to offer to help Mexico and the seven Central American countries and the random & variegated Caribbean countries buy guns back from their streets, too. Get the guns off the streets. All of them, or at least as many as we can get people to give up. We need to understand that this will only work if we can help the countries to our south get rid of their guns, too.

If I could have anything at all, I’d also ask that we take a long, hard look at repealing that damned amendment. But as a practical thing, I’d work on big-ass buybacks. Everywhere. Everywhere in the hemisphere. That means the U.S. would have to take a lead here, and maybe we would have to pay for a lot of them. But that seems only fair, after all, as so many guns in Latin America came from the U.S. to begin with.

@kay: Actually, you should care to some degree about what goes on in the homes of the gun nuts. People who swear they need rifles for home defense are a threat to their neighbors (and their families). Rifle cartridges have entirely too much energy and penetrating power for home defense. Even if the shooter hits his human target, the round may exit the body with enough energy to injure anyone behind it (like a family member in an adjoining room). If they miss, then the likelihood of that round leaving the confines of their home is unfortunately, quite high.

They misunderstand me when they think I care what goes on in their homes. They can live in a fortified bunker for all I care. Arm the whole family. The problem is their guns encountering my kid. I have just as much right as any gun nut to defend my family. If their gun ends up next to my kid, I have a problem. I can’t control their weapons, and they won’t. That leaves the state.

That’s the part they refuse to acknowledge. FREEDUMS, Bitchez! means only their freedom. The rest of us can go fuck off.

So I tell you again – they’re going to get them from the millions of guns you won’t be able to round up. For instance, the guns in Canada. The guns in Mexico – millions of guns, in fact, that will be sent over the border once they catch wind of your guns round-up.

Really? Then if this was the case, then why the heck doesn’t every fricking citizen of Holland, France, Germany or wherever have guns??? They should according to your logic. They should according to you very easily get guns from Canada or Mexico. In reality of course they don’t and your point is baseless. It is funny, though, that you think that repeating the baseless NRA rhetoric will make it true.

Actually, you should care to some degree about what goes on in the homes of the gun nuts. People who swear they need rifles for home defense are a threat to their neighbors (and their families). Rifle cartridges have entirely too much energy and penetrating power for home defense. Even if the shooter hits his human target, the round may exit the body with enough energy to injure anyone behind it (like a family member in an adjoining room). If they miss, then the likelihood of that round leaving the confines of their home is unfortunately, quite high.

If they were a responsible gun owner, they’d care about that. Self defense doesn’t include the capability of taking out innocent bystanders in exercising your right.

I think the number of responsible gun owners are far fewer than what 2nd Amendment fetishist think they are.

Look, either school shootings are such a remote possibility that they don’t merit a policy response, or they’re something we expect to happen and should prepare for.

The likelihood that another school shooting will happen somewhere is very high, especially with our insane gun laws. The likelihood that it will happen at any particular school is low. Different circumstances, different responses.

But if your proposal is that we don’t train kids in any reasonable way to respond to active shooter events

I’m sorry, when did simulating a shooting incident, right down to the sounds of gunfire become the only reasonable way to train kids to respond?

Has it ever been shown that failure to recognize gunfire as gunfire led to more casualties in a school shooting? I mean, is that really the problem here?

According to a little fiddling with the Mother Jones’ database which gives stats on mass shootings in the US 1982-2012, weapon type, weapon quantity, etc., the deadliest mass shootings (the most fatalities) were committed using semi-automatic handguns.

But of the 62 mass shootings they included, only 24 of them involved a single weapon.

Whether it was 2 or more of semi-automatic handguns, shotguns, revolvers, or assault rifles, roughly 6 out of 10 of your dedicated mass killers went in packing multiple firearms.

The only trend I could see (as far as number of what type of firearm, crudely categorized) was a slightly higher average death count (by 1 victim) for a killer using a shotgun (about 9) than by those who didn’t (about 8).

No, I was more bemoaning our lot that we’ve let our country devolve into some kind of hellscape where we have to teach our children not to panic if some nut shoot up their school because we aren’t willing to get some of these guns off the street.

Well, yeah. We aren’t willing to get these guns off the street, because they’re not on the street – they’re in people’s homes. They’re people’s legal property.

And yes, we’re not willing to go in and seize the property of people who haven’t broken any laws and never will.

Has it ever been shown that failure to recognize gunfire as gunfire led to more casualties in a school shooting?

Yes! In fact it’s led to more casualties in almost every shooting, when people hear pop-pop-pop and because it doesn’t sound like Dirty Harry’s hand cannon, they don’t know what’s going on. For instance, one survivor’s account at Columbine:

Eric and Dylan opened fire again. It didn’t sound the way gunfire sounds in the movies. Each shot was like a dart hitting a dartboard. Nothing sounded the way you’d expect.

Because they never had guns, and they don’t border Mexico and Canada. There are more than 300 million firearms already legally owned in the US. That was never the case in “Holland, France, Germany, or wherever”.

Say what???

The assumption was what would happen in the US if all guns were rounded up. Nobody would have any guns. You claimed it wouldn’t matter since Americans would get guns from Mexico and Canada anyway.

Well, I will try one last time. The same argument applies to Holland, France and Germany. Just like us, they don’t have any guns (we wouldn’t since they were all rounded up, remember?). And they have borders just like we do.

The whole point would be to make it more difficult for people to obtain guns. And this works beautifully in the countries I mentioned. When you make it harder, then most people will resort to knives (which won’t kill as many) or other less deadly things.

Yes, the US border is difficult to control. But surely you will agree that it could be made more difficult than it is today to obtain a gun. Hell, the NRA is even opposed to a cross check between a gun buyer and people on the terrorist list. If that doesn’t bother, the nothing will.

So funny to watch the “civil libertarians” on the Right and in the gun nut community put in a new regulatory scheme that applies ONLY to other people’s children.

Thanks, gun nuts! What I wanted most in life was for my kids to spend entire days undergoing mandatory training preparing for when you recklessly misplace a piece of your arsenal, or one of your family members goes off. They’ve shifted the entire burden of responsibility off the adults who amass the weapons and onto other people’s children.

Shoot Extreme® shoot house ranges wrap heart-pounding shooting experiences and reality-based training into an adventure destination for the whole family.
Cleaner. Safer. More helpful. And seriously fun.
That makes us different from old-fashioned shooting ranges, where the only thing you’re allowed to do is stand still and punch holes in stationary paper targets under well-lit conditions. Frankly, that’s not realistic training for much of anything.

That’s a place in Ohio where kids can shoot up a real live supermarket! They can face off against family members! No one dies though, although they have targets that spurt blood.

Chet is full of shit. Like most gun nuts *ahem* enthusiasts, he wants a full compliment of rights and priviledges WITHOUT any attendant responsibility, liability or requirement of sanity.

1. Gun Ownership comes with Responsibilities. The 2nd Amendment has a proviso for a “well-regulated militia” which is never, EVER discussed. If we are attempting to interpret the 2A literally, why then isn’t gun ownership tied to mandatory participation in something like the National Guard? Oh right, because people are full of shit.

2. Gun Ownership comes with Liabilities. Typically ownership of a piece of hardware that can harm others comes with legal requirement to insure against the harm it may cause to others. Automobile ownership is an oft cited example, but take a look at the insurance requirements for those who take out mortgages or own land. People are required to insure against the harm their property causes. Why should gun owners be exempt from this responsibility?

3.Gun Ownership is creating Externalities for Everyone else. While we me accept that gun ownership is a part of a person’s natural right to self-defense, this does not mean society at large should be forced to accept the risks created by gun owners who fail to properly control their firearms. Gun owners should be, without exception, required to store all firearms in way that they cannot be accessed by those without the legal rights to do so. This means locked. In a safe. Unloaded.

4. The general craziness of a fear and stupidty driven culture of guns. Allowing individuals to amass an arsenal of weapons in excess of what is reasonable for self-defense is a problem. For EVERYONE. A strict interpretation of the 2nd Amendment would see people limited to owning a single shot, muzzle loader. A loose interpretation would see individuals with access to grenades and recoilless rifles and other military grade hardware. A sane and reasonable interpretation, updated for the 21st century, would allow gun onwership for self defense, hunting and hobbyists whie placing a limit on the type and number of weapons a person could own.

Why do gun “enthusiasts” scream bloody murder whenever these points are brought up? Private Citizens are already barred from owning other forms of military weaponry. Why then to they need the ability to discharge upwards of a dozen rounds from a gun without the need to reload?

And why should the public be burdened with the unnecessary risk of having so many weapons so widely proliferated throughout society with less oversight than we place on people who own things as benign as Land or a Toyota Camry?

Uh…what society do you live in that you think it is even remotely possible?

This is not Japan, and any attempt to actually ban guns and forcibly confiscate then will literally tear the country apart in Civil War round two. (yes, a literal shooting war) You would have about as much luck trying to ban evangelical Christianity, and many, many gun owners are as passionate about their firearms convictions as evangelical Christians are about theirs.

@Chet:
Adam Lanza had free access to his mother’s guns, which was quite legal. At the point when he obtained them on the morning of the killings, he was not doing anything illegal. Nor did he do anything illegal until the moment he shot her.

Mnemosyne is right: Lanza’s mother bought the guns legally, so he too gained access to them legally.

Honestly, I don’t know why so many people seem to think this is an awful idea–some of the straw men about it are particularly bewildering. It’s a *great* idea. Most people don’t know what real gunfire sounds like, and being able to recognize what’s happening more quickly increases the likelihood of initiating the correct crisis response sooner. How many times have we heard shooting survivors say something to the effect that they didn’t realize what was happening because what they heard didn’t sound like gunfire to them?

So yes, by all means, set up a crisis response training day where a trained professional shoots an AR-15 and a handgun–loaded with blanks–in a safe manner out in the hallway or in a different room from everyone else.

Provided that:
– You’re not shooting the blanks *at* or near anyone
– You’re doing it in a different room from the kids, far enough away to not be a danger to anyone’s hearing
– EVERYONE involved knows what to expect–including the local police–so that there isn’t a freakout
– You combine it with training on the appropriate way to respond in that kind of situation

Yes, it’s utterly *appalling* that we live in a society where it’s necessary for schoolkids to know what real gunfire sounds like and how to respond to it. But the necessity for it is what’s offensive, not the proposal itself.